GREEN- County club: Residents put their money where recycling is

Sue Battani's My Recycling Club is pretty much the main curbside recycling action going on in Albemarle. PHOTO BY WILL WALKER

Some Albemarle citizens, perhaps "green" with envy over the curbside recycling options enjoyed by their Charlottesville cousins, are paying to recycle.

The county has lagged behind the city in commingled curbside recycling since Albemarle dropped most of its costly program in 2003. Trash haulers are still required to pick up newspapers, but anything else conscientious residents want to recycle, they have to haul– most likely burning precious fossil fuels along the way– to the McIntire Recycling Center.

This spring, at the request of some Ivy residents, Cville Concierge owner Sue Battani started My Recycling Club. For $20 a month and a minimum of six households in a subdivision, Battani will pick up recycling every other week. Residents still have to separate the glass, plastic, and aluminum themselves, and My Recycling Club takes the sorted materials to McIntire.

"It's going fabulous," says Battani, who started with 12 families in April, and now has 98 signed up– so many that she had to add another pick-up day.

She's had to turn down would-be clients in sparsely populated areas of the county. "We're trying to focus on denser neighborhoods," she says, and particularly wants to add more neighborhoods in Earlysville.

Her clients range from diehard recyclers to those who pay $20 a month to recycle three glass jars, a couple of water bottles, and a stack of newspapers. "We're excited," says Battani.